When it came to improving Britain’s biggest hedge fund operator, Luke Ellis was the man with the plan. The chief executive of Man Group has been at the controls of the hedgie now for five years, having joined the turnaround team led by Manny Roman in 2010.
The business he joined was a bureaucratic mess, over-reliant on the flagship AHL fund and suffering heavy redemptions as investors pulled their money out. Roman had just bought hedge fund GLG Partners to smooth the volatile performance.
The turnaround team bought new businesses to diversify and grow in the US and has invested heavily in technology to grow its computerised trading “quant” funds — whose buying and selling strategies are calculated by algorithms rather than humans. There’s an